Haegue Yang: Tightrope Walking and Its Wordless Shadow

Landmark works and new commissions for Yang's first solo show in Italy

La Triennale di Milano and Fondazione Furla are pleased to announce Haegue Yang: Tightrope Walking and Its Wordless Shadow, an exhibition curated by Bruna Roccasalva and organized by Fondazione Furla and La Triennale di Milano.Tightrope Walking and Its Wordless Shadow, which marks Yang’s first solo show in Italy, explores the vast array of media employed by this artist, ranging from paper collage, video essays, and performative sculptures to large-scale installations. Yang’s spectrum of allusions and visions flows freely between social inquiry and history, personal life and collective memory, yielding images and experiences of enormous evocative power, in which objects, people, and places are inextricably linked.Tightrope Walking and Its Wordless Shadow unfolds through three rooms where landmark works are combined with ambitious new commissions to highlight recurring themes in the artist’s career: abstraction and geometry, movement and performativity, and the relationship between folding and unfolding. Yang explores all of these as interwoven entities in a selection of pieces, that represent key stages in her oeuvre since 2000, including most recent. It points to her deep engagement with the unspoken: the urge to create a language as subtle and delicate as a tightrope walk, where movement becomes powerfully dynamic and charged with both emotional and perceptual tension. The introductory room presents two installations: the thread installation 134.9 m³ (2000-2018) and chalk drawing 81 m² (2002-2018), both regarded as seminal series. These subtle and sensitive installations usher us into the show. Locked within the space marked off by their lines, which are tilted at an angle of exactly one degree,is the text work Science of Communication #1 – A Study on How to Make Myself Understood (2000) on an A3 format sheet of paper, addressing the artist’s early concerns with language and translation in the sphere of cultural and social integration. In contrast to the first room, the large-scale installation Cittadella (2011) is an intense presence that spectacularly transforms the main space. Made up of 176 venetian blinds, Cittadella creates a multisensory environment of intricate modular structures, which is penetrated by physically walking into it, and by the hypnotizing movement of six robotic lights. Passing through this fanciful underworld of habitational structures, we encounter another large open space that feels like a ballroom, with large, mural-like pieces covering three walls. The series Trustworthies (2010-2018) is a substantial cycle of work, in which Yang combines different graphic materials, patterned envelopes, her own custom-printed graph paper, Grid Bloc (2000-2018), and reflective vinyls. Two newly commissioned performative sculptures, from her Dress Vehicles series (2011-2018), will “dance off” the space.In Yang’s ongoing process of experimentation, chance encounters with an object or material are prone to generate unexpected forms, emotions, and narratives, mapping out an ambivalent space that is both accessible and inaccessible, in which the rejection of entrenched ideas always opens up new perspectives.

Haegue Yang (b. 1971 in Seoul, South Korea; based in Berlin and Seoul) is one of most renowned artist of her generation, educated both in Korea (BFA, Seoul National University, 1994), her country of origin, as well as in Germany (Meisterschüler, Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, 1999). Yang teaches at her alma mater in Germany and actively exhibits internationally. Her solo exhibitions were held at major international museums such as the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2009); New Museum, New York (2010); Kun­sthaus Bre­genz (2011); Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2011); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2012); Bergen Kunsthall (2013); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2015); Serralves Museum, Porto (2016); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2016); and Kunsthaus Graz (2017-18). Her work has been featured in group shows at some of the world’s leading institutions, including the Hayward Gallery, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; MoMA and Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. She has taken part in major international exhibitions such as the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, (2008); Gwangju Biennale (2010); dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel (2012); and the Taipei Biennial (2014). In 2009, she represented Korea at the 53rd Venice Biennale. Yang is this year’s winner of the prestigious Wolfgang Hahn Prize, and a first major retrospective of her work is currently on view at Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2018) until August 12 this year.

Info

7 September – 4 November, 2018

Press conference:
6 September at 11.30 am
Opening:
6 September at 7 pm